It is a common practice within the detention industry and other public facilities, such as jails, prisons, juvenile detention centers, and psychiatric hospitals, to permanently affix certain furnishing such as the beds, cabinets, shelves, lavatories, sinks etc. and fixtures such as steel wall plates to the walls of the facility. A steel wall plate is a sheet of steel that is utilized to form or cover an existing wall to provided addition security within a detainment facility. Permanently affixing these fixtures to the walls prevents destruction of the fixtures themselves and reduces the likelihood of an inmate utilizing the fixtures as a weapon to injure a guard or cell mate. The conventional method of permanently installing these fixtures has been to form a cavity within a fully constructed wall unit, install a reinforcing bar or bars into the cavity, and then grouting the reinforcing bar(s) within the cavity using a cementing agent such as cement. A steel plate is then welded or otherwise affixed to the reinforcing bars in a manner to cover the grouted cavity opening. The steel plate acts as a mounting base to which a fixture mounting bracket, such as a length of angle iron, is welded or otherwise permanently affixed.
This method of permanently affixing fixtures to concrete block walls, masonry walls and pre-cast walls is labor intensive and leads to a degraded wall structure. In addition, the gap between the concrete block wall and the steel plate may be used to hide razor blades, knives, drugs, and other contraband articles. It would be a benefit, therefore, to have a embeddable mounting device that could be used in connection with a wall that did not provide a gap between the wall and a steel mounting surface and that forms an integral part of the wall construction. It would also be desirable to have a method for mounting a fixture permanently to a concrete block wall that did not require degrading the wall structure by forming a cavity within the preexisting wall during installation of the fixture.